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  I saw Tom walking along a corridor at the college and got this instant crush on him. He was only in his early twenties, but he seemed much older than me, and he had this droopy mustache that made him seem very artistic. His hair was Beatles long, with a floppy fringe falling over his eyes. He looked different from other men, as if he possessed a certain sort of knowledge I wanted to have too. I was desperate to know something about something, always on the lookout for anyone who looked like they had access.

  There was something about the way he walked, the way he dressed, wearing round glasses like John Lennon did later. It seemed exotic. I approached him, because I had found a boldness in Syracuse, and said, “Wow, I really like the way you look.”

  He said, “Why don’t you come and visit my class?”

  How could I refuse? That was the turning point for me.

  I entered the world of theater and the arts through a side door. I had done a little singing in church with my brother, and we had a little singing group, with a girl called Zenova. I didn’t sing lead or anything like that. I always felt that the voice of a woman should be high and pretty. I sounded more like a man. My mother was a lyric soprano and had an incredible high, pure voice, so I always thought I was merely the harmony, the lower end, the tenor alto. I never really thought I could sing at all, because my voice was so deep and manly. My mom was to me the perfect image of what a singer should be, so it was never my ambition to sing. I could never be as great as her.

  It was through Tom that I left Syracuse and began my travels, because he asked me to take part in a summer stock tour he was arranging. The first stop on the tour was at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Summer stock, where small theater companies staged productions during the summer months when traditional theater companies were on hiatus, was very popular on the East Coast, where barns or old mills were transformed into theaters. Soon they would look a little quaint, but Tom was very passionate about the idea, as they had been a great training ground for actors and students.

  Summer stock introduced would-be actors not only to acting, but also to the technical side of setting up a show—the idea being Hey, there’s a barn, let’s paint it and put on a show! There was a 1950 Judy Garland/Gene Kelly musical called Summer Stock, featuring “Get Happy,” where a theater troupe uses a barn as their theater in return for doing chores on the farm. You didn’t get paid, but you got digs, and it was an amazing way for me, without any training, to get on the stage.

  Tom was very keen that I get involved. He saw something in me, maybe how enthusiastic I was. He came to see my mom and dad and explained to them about the educational value of summer stock. Tom told them he would look out for me. He was very proper in his approach, and they saw nothing to be concerned about. He was a teacher, so they respected that. They were very trusting, but with reason: He said he would absolutely make sure I was okay. I was so excited about the idea, they couldn’t really say no.

  He put me in a house in Philadelphia with a doctor and his family for the summer. It was all very legit, so my parents were reassured. I lived in the family’s children’s room while they were away. Tom wrote music and songs for his productions, and he had written a musical based on the Canterbury Tales. He pushed me, and said, “You can sing, you can definitely sing.” Taking to the stage seemed very natural, because the church is like a show, it’s an act; you’re onstage, surrounded by other people who want to be taken somewhere, who want to believe in something. You are performing. The singing part I didn’t believe in, because I had been brought up to think that singing was only for church, by pure singers like my mom, and I couldn’t shake that off. Tom said he loved my voice, and that made me relax.

  He gave me such confidence, which was the biggest high I had experienced since speaking in tongues, or since the shenanigans in the gully at the bottom of my road. It was such a thrill to have someone older than me, who knew about things, take me seriously and encourage me.

  There were nine of us in the production, each playing four or five different roles—we were called the Ruskin Players. I would play an old lady, all bent and withered, which I took from Ma, my great-grandmother, and a nine-year-old boy I knew locally. I’m good at looking boyish. Without makeup I look more like a Nigerian boy than an African lady, even now. Tom made Madame Eglentyne a drag queen. It was very forward-thinking, to put the characters in drag.

  I liked the way his mind worked. He was definitely one of those teachers keen on expanding minds by breaking down barriers, between art and life, teacher and student, performer and audience. He was interested in a form of social exchange that was a revelation to me. It wasn’t about the mindless reproduction of knowledge; it was about the meeting with others, the pursuit of freedom and space. It was exactly what I needed to come across at the moment in my life, when I could easily have rebelled to such an extent that it would have led to real delinquency. Instead, it appealed to a sense of purpose that I had inherited from my family, however warped it was.

  I loved doing the stage work. It’s what stopped me wanting to be a teacher. It gave me something else to think about, in terms of what I could be in life. In Jamaica, in my family, it’s like they want you to know what you want to be before you are born. Discovering the stage gave me a way of throwing that out of the window—through the window, so it shattered and there was no way to put it back together again.

  With me it was decided before I was born, certainly on the Jones side, that I would be a teacher or a lawyer, that I would enter a proper profession, something that required an orderly mind. With my mother marrying a preacher, all she wanted was for me to marry a preacher. I felt there were enough preachers in our family! I feel the same about music when they tell me to do what everyone else is doing in order to be a success. I say, No, there is enough of that already. Sameness is depressing and even dangerous. Let’s have something different. I am always going upstream when everyone else is going downstream. This is something that I was born with.

  Tom and summer stock tapped into that contrariness. I liked moving around, meeting people, being with Tom. I liked his sense of humor. I liked the long conversations we had about art and theater, Jack Kerouac and John Cassavetes. He was definitely my first mentor. He believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. I inevitably developed such a crush on Tom, if only based on how free and easy he seemed, and what he talked about. I totally fell for him, in all my innocence and lust for new experience, and, inevitably, he turned out to be gay.

  After we had finished performing the play, I thought, Well, I’m not going back home, I don’t need no more education. This is education. Being out in the changing world seemed to be what I needed, not going back to my small-town mom and dad. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to know the world like the palm of my hand.

  Angela Davis and Jimi Hendrix were wearing Afros now. The Supremes were a little Las Vegas, but Diana Ross’s Afro ostentatiously mushroomed around her head like a woolly cloud with a mind of its own. I was young, but I was Jamaican old—the girls mature earlier in Jamaica. I would have been married with two children by now back home. It was time to find a new family.

  Tom had written a song about Philadelphia for one of his student productions, Kiss Me Kool, in 1960, about how the city was thought of as being square, an old town not keeping up to date. Nothing ever happens here in Philly / Living in Philly, what would you expect / But just as long as we live in Philly / Then leave us show a little respect. By the time I got there, things had changed, and it was my first real big-city experience. Once I had a taste of it, I was hooked.

  I stayed in Philly to try and find myself, or more of myself. The Georgian architecture tugged at something in the back of my mind, but mostly, it was the virile skyscrapers punching the clouds that set my heart racing, and how you could have contact with so many new people. I loved the life of the street in the city. The thousands of people all moving around at the same time in different directions exhilarated me. For a while, when you arrive in a ne
w place, you are in a limbo zone—raw, naked, easily moldable—and I loved that feeling. It means you are on the verge of a new life, and I was on the hunt for other lives, new experiences, anything to escape having my mind controlled by others.

  The person that I was in Jamaica was not really me, because I never had a thought of my own. I had never made a decision independently, I had no responsibility in terms of my own destiny, so once I got away, that was what became important—being in control of my own destiny. In the big city, every moment you had to make a decision for yourself. This didn’t scare me; it excited me. I wanted to remake the world through my eyes. I wanted to create reality the way a child does, something separate from the allegedly civilizing notions of the adults who raised me.

  I had to get rid of that old person, but not completely, only the part of me that was under the control of other people. Funnily enough, that part of my life did help me whenever I found myself going too close to the edge. There was something about the idea of prayer, of believing in something, even if you turned that into meditation, into a way of finding yourself. I supposed I would test out the idea of faith when I set out on my own, even as I was turning my back on the way I was brought up.

  I wanted to take risks in a way I had never been allowed to as a child. Risks are a strengthening thing, and I took them to strengthen myself. I started to take drugs, as part of that risk taking. If you are a curious kitty, and I was a very curious kitty, you will take drugs however much you are warned not to. If you are warned by people whom you do not trust, because everything they do seems wrong, then you naturally think, Well, drugs must be a good thing. I found places to stay, in the hippie communes that were starting to emerge, which were very welcoming, and I set out to explore the city behind the scenes. To label them hippie was a way of describing what was happening, but these types of communes had been around certainly since Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters took their famous bus trip in 1964, some of them based on experimental, improvisatory art colonies like Black Mountain College. The self-sufficient Rasta commune Pinnacle, founded by Leonard Howell in the impassive Jamaican hills, was a definite ancestor. There had apparently been hippies hanging around South Street in Philadelphia since 1963.

  Hippie communes were the perfect places for me at the time. They had an open membership policy, and attracted the flamboyantly outrageous. They were full of different sorts of people wanting another way of life, to reject mainstream culture, to be rescued from some nightmare or another. I needed to get away from my parents, because they still maintained a link with the church, with the dreadful past.

  This was my way of getting out of the Jamaican isolation. I wanted to know everything as soon as I could, even if I had to invent some of it, make it up. I went into things a little protected, getting a little help from others without relying on them completely.

  I had an Italian boyfriend who worked in Philly, Sam Miceli. He was a hippie, a thoughtful hippie, committed to changing things, and used drugs not excessively or self-indulgently, to get off his head, but experimentally. He had the long hair that was by now cascading down his back. He worked for the city as a housing inspector, and that was the time when if you worked for the city, you had to have short hair. He would put it in a ponytail, but he was still asked to cut it off. He hated the rules and restrictions put in place by the government, and he was in the newspaper once for protesting about having to get rid of his ponytail. There was real prejudice against people with different beliefs that he considered discrimination. We went on a protest together. He won the case and didn’t have to cut off his hair, as long as it was neat.

  He was very protective of me. He would come with me on my adventures, helping me when I said I wanted to discover new things. To earn money, I became a go-go dancer in those clubs where lonely men on the road staying in cheap hotels would pay for a little relatively suggestive dance. They couldn’t touch you, though. Sam would come and sit in the back and make sure I was okay.

  I developed a tendency toward vagrancy. I forged quite a bond with local bums sleeping rough. I was intrigued by the fact they had rejected society so completely. I would invite them into my apartment for a bath and give them food, drink, and some clothes. It was very church of me, because I took from the church the idea of looking after those who had nowhere to go. In a way, those people who cooked and cleaned inside our house, like Sister Leah, were vagrants. They were homeless and were helped by the church and taken in, like adopted children, even if that was a double-edged sword. They were given a home, but they had to work hard for their room and board.

  I went on a ride with the Hells Angels once. It was like I sensed meaning in the noise their bikes made. I found the people I was attracted to were attracted to me, because we were all trying to break free of something, looking for freedom. I was interested in interesting people who might be able to plug me into a new world, to help me move into new places. I was on the hunt for them. It seemed like a time of revolution, and I wanted to run with the revolutionaries.

  I lived as a nudist for one month in Philly—1967 or ’68 or ’69, whenever it was—and it was a good summer to sit naked. At home, every day, I walked around with no clothes on. If anyone came to the door, I was naked. I didn’t go to nudist camps or anything like that—I basically lived at home as a nudist. In Spanish Town, in Syracuse, they made me wear clothes that covered most of my body from head to toe, like a burka. I couldn’t even wear open-toed shoes. Being nude was my response. I was born. I was reborn.

  * * *

  I still kept in touch with Tom Figenshu while I was in Philly. Working in the theater was still my ambition. When he said I should join the actors’ union I had to choose a name. There was already a Beverly Jones, which was still the name I was known most by, so Tom said, “Well, try your school name, Grace Jones.”

  Chris, being Chris, said, “Well, why don’t you call yourself Tiesha.” They all have names like that now on fame-hunting reality shows, but back then it sounded very strange, like something from Star Trek. It was so camp, Tiesha! So I was nearly Tiesha Jones. There turned out to be another Grace Jones, so I put myself down in the end as Grace B. Jones. For a while, that was what I was known as. My checks were made out to Grace B. Jones. Grace, though, had taken over from Bev, and Beverly withdrew deep inside me.

  It was a part of the whole getting away from the uniform, the not being able to do things. It was all part of the therapy I was performing on myself. My boyfriend Sam and I moved into an apartment together after a few weeks in a hippie commune. My parents had no idea about any of this. They had waved me off as I left to join the theater, and then I more or less disappeared into the vastness of America.

  I used to get arrested in Philly almost every day Sam and I went out. Black or white policemen would see us together in his car, and they would arrest me for prostitution. That was their only answer to why a white guy was with a black girl. The same guys would arrest me all the time, even though by then they knew we were together. Sometimes when Sam picked me up from work, from my dancing, in a hotel, out between northeast Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey, I would be stopped by deadpan policemen caped in their bulky black leather jackets and sporting big gold badges. Black, a little insolent looking, wearing loose, gaudy hippie clothes mixed with some figure-hugging leather dancing clothes, bright, shiny makeup, teased up Afro bursting out of my head, provocatively dangling earrings—I must have looked been easy for young, ignorant police officers to typecast.

  While I was working at the hotel in Trenton, the week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, there were riots in Trenton, and hundreds of downtown businesses were ransacked and set alight. There were hundreds of arrests, mostly of young black men, and sixteen policeman were injured. I wasn’t there, didn’t even know it was happening, but clearly as soon as I was spotted by the police, I was public enemy number one.

  They were so racist on both sides—the black cops were just as likely to pick me up and give me a hard time
. It became harassment. I never thought it was because I was black. I still didn’t think of myself as black, not in the African-American sense. I simply thought they were jealous. I thought they wanted a piece of my action, that they wanted to get into my pants! I thought, Is this the only way you know how to do it, by arresting me? It was only years later that it occurred to me it was because I was black.

  I wanted so much to be a part of America that I would not let the idea I was different, even in a way that made Americans themselves different, get in the way. I was also determined to resist categorization, because that immediately meant being restricted and definitely meant being judged.

  Perhaps it was so overwhelming coming to America that I could not let it bother me. If I’d been born there and really lived it, as a black person, it would have been different. It would have absolutely defined me, but I came into it from a distance. To be honest, I don’t know how black America can ever get over how its history developed with this monstrous split. The Jamaican split was much more cryptic; American racial tension seemed like a movie to me. It was something I saw at the cinema, representing people that came from a very different place than me, and I didn’t identify with them simply because I wasn’t white.

  Mostly I was in a good place: I was . . . free, free, free, even if I was being chased by the police. However frustrating the police could be, they were never as soul destroying as Mas P. If you survive a childhood like mine relatively unscathed, you’re lucky, and as soon as you can make up rules for yourself, that’s what you are going to do, without thinking about what you leave behind.

  My parents didn’t see me for a long time. I would check in by phone now and then, but I never let them know where I was. They were going out of their minds, but I never fully appreciated that. It’s only now that I have my own son and know how worried I get if he isn’t in touch with me for a few days that I realize how concerned they must have been.